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eBuyer £1 sale fail: Customers vent fury... on Facebook

Idle Cyber Monday shoppers can't be bothered to pick up phone

eBuyer is facing a mini customer revolt on Facebook over the collapse of its website during the £1 sale on Cyber Monday.

The etailer says that an unprecedented numbers of visitors caused the portal to crash leaving many "frustrated", but people took to the social media site to voice their disgust.

Customer Mark Herridge posted a comment today on eBuyer's Facebook wall saying he had contacted Trading Standards about the "scam it pulled on Monday", comments echoed by another disgruntled individual Adam Chase.

"Here at eBuyer we trick our customers into flooding our website at the same tome all for a bogus '£1 clearance sales' knowing our servers can't handle it and only our staff can access the website, using a direct line," he claimed.

Jorrell Knight pointed out that if eBuyer had been "an actual store not online, its [sic] the equivalent of someone glueing the doors shut! Please consider trying another sales when ur servers can handle the traffic."

Angry customers also vented their displeasure on The Reg, with PaulR79 saying the supposed sales extravaganza was a "spectacular fail and showcase for how not to run an online sales event".

He remarked that eBuyer appeared to have been deleting unfavourable posts from its Facebook page to "try to hide the scale of the mess". He was not alone is adopting this line.

A spokesman at East Yorkshire Trading Standards told El Reg that Howden-based eBuyer had warned it on Monday to expect complaints from customers but so far just one person had picked up the phone to vent their spleen.

"It is more of an embarrassing story for eBuyer and its website rather than a Trading Standards issue," he said, adding that it would get involved if consumers had been charged, received no goods and not given a discount.

He said that Buyer needs to ensure that in future it was better prepared for heavily promoted sales events.

Dave Wood, commercial director at eBuyer, said that after promoting the discount day on Facebook its followers more than doubled from 20,000, "it was so much bigger than we ever thought".

He said sites of bigger vendors had in the past buckled under the strain of traffic volumes: "It happens to us all". ®